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Exchange of emails with the Fawcett Society about a hustings they have organised for this Thursday:

Quote:

As election agent for candidates standing in both Oxford constituencies in May I notice you have organised a hustings on Thursday 12 March in Ruskin College but that our candidates have not been invited. This would appear to be an infringements of the rules on hustings laid down by the Electoral Commission, as set out in this document, particularly pages 7 and 8: http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/169480/sp-hustings-npc-ukpge.pdf Hopefully, this is just because you didn't know we were standing. Adam Buick Election Agent for Kevin Parkin, Prospective Socialist Party candidate for Oxford East and Mike Foster, Prospective Socialist Party candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon.

Their reply:

Quote:

Thank you for showing an interest in this event. When planning the hustings, we agreed to only invite candidates with MPs. As you can see on pages 5 and 6 of the Electoral Commission document, this is a legitimate impartial reason meaning we are not infringing on these rules. The hustings we are holding is of course non-selective, as Fawcett is politically unaligned we would not be able to use this event to promote voters to support a particular party in any case. We just want to encourage people to vote, and to engage on the policies that affect women in particular. We would of course welcome you to join us at the event as part of the audience.

Our response:

Quote:

Thanks. We don't accept that your reasons necessarily make your hustings
"non-selective" but as the Fawcett Society is not a registered "third
party" and are not likely to spend more than £9750 per constituency it
makes no practical difference either way.

Your meeting may encourage people to vote (for the parties invited) but it
won't contribute to the spread of the basic democratic principle that in
any election all the candidates should have an equal say.

We assume that you will be taking account of the Electoral Commission's
view that you should announce that we also will be standing in both Oxford
East and Oxford West & Abingdon and that the names of our candidates are,
respectively, Kevin Parkin and Mike Foster. Also, that, as we say in our
declaration of principles drawn up in 1904, "the emancipation of the
working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without
distinction of race or sex."

Ah well, you can't win them all.

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LBird wrote:

Yes, I have tried, and I know that, with you at least, I've failed. That makes me unhappy.

This observation from a non-member of this forum should make you even more unhappy:

Quote:

I am a loyal reader of the forum. Sometimes I recommend threads on it to friends — such as the thread on hunter-gatherers. (But then I have to warn them to not read any postings from or back to the tiresome maniac LBird.)

 

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We ventured outside the city borders of Oxford today to Cumnor where our candidate Mike Foster helped clean up part of the area:https://twitter.com/DeanCourtCC/status/574546617547751424Also taking part were Dr Helen Salisbury, the National Health Action Party candidate, and the LibDem hopeful, Layla Moran (it was a LibDem seat till the last election). Also a LibDem candidate for the Vale of White Horse district council where elections are also taking place on 7 May.At the same time we got the remaining three signatories on the nomination paper. So that chore is now over.Also learned of a couple of other hustings, to which we have not yet been invited.Back in Oxford we met local sympathisers and planned literature stalls in April, one every Thursday evening (starting 9 April) and one every Saturday morning, as well as a presence at the Oxford May Day event (no, not the students jumping off Magdalen bridge).

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Diolch, Mr Moderator.

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Hud955 wrote:

Chomsky claims that underneath all the superficial differences of actual grammars, there is a single underlying universal grammatical structure which was installed in our brain through genetic mutation some time in our ancestral past.  The problem is, he has never been able to identify a single rule belonging to  his underlying universal grammar which all languages have in common.

Let alone identifying the gene or genes involved

Hud955 wrote:

I am no linguist, but I am also aware that languages divide the observable world up in different ways.  One particularly obvious example is the way they divide up the colour spectrum.  Colour words in Welsh for example do not map on to colour words in English. Welsh has a single word to cover what in English we would distinguish as dark blue and grey, for instance. 

I didn't know that and I had to learn Welsh yn ysgol. As a matter of curiosity, what is the word?

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Very significant that hustings organisers are themselves beginning to distinguish between "selective" and "non-selective" ones and are preferring the latter.Meanwhile Thursday's Oxford Mail reported another de facto "non-selective" one:

Quote:

Election candidates in business debateOXFORD: A General Election debate will take place tonight at Unipart Conference Centre in Garsington Road, Cowley, at 7pm.The public are welcome at the free hustings event organised by The Federation of Small Businesses.Candidates for the Oxford East constituency are Labour MP Andrew Smith, Melanie Magee (Conservative), and Ann Duncan (Green).UKIP candidate Ian Macdonald is unable to attend because of ill health. John Howson, the Lib Dem candidate for Banbury, will stand in for Alastair Murray, who cannot attend.

Two declared candidates (us and TUSC) were not invited.Mind you, not sure what we would have had to say to the representatives of the local petty-bourgeoisie (though no doubt TUSC would have promised them some protection from competition from the big bourgeoisie). Still, we ought not to let this sort of thing pass without protesting, so I'll have to look up their address.

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Thanks, Stuart. A more detailed summary of this interesting, empirical study here:http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/2014-corporate-investment.phpThe findings do seem rather obvious to those with a knowledge of how capitalism works, i.e that it is driven by the search for profits and that this explains both "corporate investment behaviour" (and why it leads to booms and slumps).

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Contribution from a follower in the Far East of this forum:

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taken from Victor Mair's blog at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17949 , on the 'If you speak Mandarin, your brain is different' article: =================== Turning to the question of tones and the brain, I asked several colleagues who specialize in the cognitive aspects of East Asian languages their opinion of the article and paper cited above.  Their replies follow below.From Bill Hannas:If the study did no more than the linked article states, it fails to support its conclusion.  The claim, reportedly, is that phonemic tone accounts for observed differences in brain network activation between English and Mandarin speakers.  While these differences, if valid, are interesting, why didn't the researchers back up their claim by testing additional groups of speakers, e.g., Vietnamese (south: 5 tones, north: 6) or, for that matter, native speakers of other Chinese languages where the number of tones, their contours, sandhi rules and, arguably, linguistic importance vary from the Mandarin "standard"?  Am I missing something here?From Jim Unger:There may be an area somewhere in the right hemisphere that controls suprasegmental pitch adjustments (tone) in real time, but so what?  It certainly doesn't mean that the brains of Mandarin speakers are unique in some transcendental way.  There are loads of other tone or pitch accent languages in the world, even if they are a minority of all languages.  It doesn't prove that phonemic tone is transcendentally special:  there are many other "unusual" phonemic contrasts that occur in only a minority of languages, any one of which might also be handled in some specific brain area or other.  It does not add significant evidence to support sweeping theories of hemispheric laterality, on which Kosslyn and others have lately poured a good deal of empirical cold water.  In fact, given that speech production involves the coordination of numerous articulatory gestures in real time, it is more likely that pitch adjustments, voice onset time for obstruents, etc., are under the control of several competing loci in the brain, not just one, even if that one seems always to be active during the time that gesture is occurring.From a psycholinguist who specializes on Chinese:This is of course pretty surfacy stuff. Our brains are all different, and if you were to hold everything else constant and allow to vary only the languages that we speak, you'd find very minor, insignificant differences. Mandarin lights up brain areas about the same as any other language when the same tasks are performed. Functionally speaking, tasks focusing on 'contrastive tone' and 'contrastive stress' would activate the same brain areas, and those areas would only minimally involve R-hemisphere 'musical tone'.From a colleague who is a specialist on writing systems:Usually when I read a story on "here's your brain on Mandarin vs. English" there's some sort of link to Hanzi, along with entirely unsupported claims of their special and useful difference. So it's refreshing to see something without that for a change. Still, the article doesn't say anything about just how much difference was observed. And I'm wondering a lot about what is called "intelligible speech." Is that Mandarin as it is normally spoken or with the exaggerated tones of sing-song speech so common when someone is asked to read aloud?Is tonal vs. non-tonal really such an absolute distinction? Are there degrees? And as the write-up notes, "Tone matters in English, just not to the same extent as in Chinese." So what happens in the brains of English speakers if given tonal variations on the "Where have you been?" question?Another thing I'd like to see is the same study run with native speakers of tonal languages with different tones than Mandarin: Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Thai, for example. Are there differences among them? And would PRC-based scientists want to risk a study that might point to possible differences (however small) in the brains of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers? Heh.Tones are not sacrosanct, nor do they have the ability to modify a person'e brain.

So it seems that the press exaggerated the significance of the research mentioned in the opening post of this thread.Back to square one, then. But there must be somebody other than Sinocentrics and Chris Knight who can or have mounted a credible challenge to Chomsky's biological determinism on this issue.

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Dave B wrote:

Re; that early Christians were ‘proto Marxists’, as Bart Erhman briefly ‘considered’ in one of his best selling books.

The earliest christians were clearly proto Jehovah's Witnesses who wanted to have nothing to do with then existing society and were waiting for the end of the world in their lifetime.

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I thought you did have. What with managing our facebook and meetup pages I'll contact Andy and Howard with the suggestion.  They've also made use of these contacts in Swansea and Easington.

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gnome wrote:

We in Kent and Sussex have also been inundated with emails via 38 degrees about TTIP.  Our candidate in Folkestone & Hythe, Andy Thomas, responded to one such email […}Whilst our candidate in Brighton Pavilion, Howard Pilott, replied to another email with contrasting brevity:

Quote:

We in the SPGB propose scrapping capitalism, which should hopefully allay your fears.

Did Andy literally reply to only one?  For Oxford we have replied to every single one of the 300 or so (and counting) we received. I imagine a place like Brighton must have received a similar number. More hopefully.Once you've done the first you can use that reply for the rest. It's just a matter of cut and paste. Here we have a self-selected list of people who are already interested in international matters from a critical perspective. Which is why we've used their email addresses to make a database for at least one future mail-out. That takes a bit more work and time but is the modern equivalent of knocking on people's doors. After all, they say that e-campaigning is now the thing. We'll also be doing weekly literature stalls as well of course.

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Our candidates in Swansea, Oxford, Islington and Easington have received what must be 400 emails via 39 Degrees about TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). We've replied to as many as we can.  Here's one respose we've had:

Quote:

Goodness me! Love to attend that. In fact must be honest and say that it had never occurred to me that SPGB continued to exist!!! Some 60 years ago I counted myself one of your supporters, having got fed up listening to Tony Cliff and Gerry Healey spout on about Trotsky and permanent revolution. Can't remember now who came to the Malatesta Club to tell us about SPGB, but I was impressed.

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Today's Times reports this under the headline "Eat goat, say Hindu nationalists as beef is banned in Mumbai". Apparently they are owners who refuse to rent property to those who eat beef. That's a new one "No Irish. No Blacks. No Beefeaters".

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I heard that episode too. He did strongly make the point we do that at work and in the family "communism" prevails. The trouble is he doesn't think society as a whole could operate on this basis.

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Here's the excellent 25 minute talk about what the speaker says we should better call "cover-up" throrires:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/world-socialist-movement/audio-upload-what-conspiracy-theories-arent-telling-you

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